South Africa and Australia each brutally repressed their black population, one out of fear and the other out of disdain. Hatreds differ, widely. In the social context, aversions are often normal, banal: I strongly dislike twelve-tone music, runny fried eggs, heights....

Next Monday, 24 April, is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. It coincides this year with 27 Nisan, which is Israel’s Day of [remembering] the Holocaust and Heroism (Yom Hashoah ve-Hagevurah) and the Hebrew calendar anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. April is...

The Jewish world has ebbed and flowed over the past eight centuries. A notable Jewish experience was expulsion from England in the thirteenth century and return in the seventeenth. Another was the transition from patriotic citizenship in what was to become Germany in...

Simon Biesheuvel was an esteemed South African psychologist. Achievement, he maintained, was never a matter of race but one of bent or aptitude. Yes, but he should have added that one isn’t born with bent — it is something you are nurtured to, and socialised in,...

If someone asked you which sport, if any, could turn bitter Cold War enemies into friends, open up economic trade and contribute to global stability, which would you nominate? The Olympics? God forbid! Sepp Blatter’s sordid world of soccer? Nein, nyet. Ever so...